In this blog, we will cover the Azure DevOps Engineer Interview Questions and Answers.
Microsoft Azure is one of the most used and fastest-growing cloud service providers. Azure is expected to grow in the future, and with more demand, more Azure professionals are required. Talking about professionals, DevOps Engineer has been the most demanding job role in the IT sector. Most learners are already preparing themselves to become skilled Azure DevOps engineers, and for those, we are here to cover some most asked topics in Azure DevOps Interview.
Let’s have a quick review of frequently asked Azure DevOps interview questions and answers for beginners, intermediates and for the experienced.
Azure DevOps Interview Questions – Table of content
- Azure DevOps Interview Questions for Beginners
- Azure DevOps Interview Questions for Intermediate
- Azure DevOps Interview Questions for Experienced
- Conclusion
Azure DevOps Interview Questions for Beginners
Q.1 What are the differences between DevOps & Agile?
Parameter | Agile | DevOps |
---|---|---|
What is it? | Agile refers to an iterative approach that focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases. | DevOps is considered a practice of bringing development and operations teams together. |
Purpose | Agile helps to manage complex projects. | DevOps central concept is to manage end-to-end engineering processes. |
Task | The agile process focuses on constant changes. | DevOps focuses on constant testing and delivery. |
Implementation | The agile method can be implemented within a range of tactical frameworks like a sprint, safe, and scrum. | The primary goal of DevOps is to focus on collaboration, so it doesn’t have any commonly accepted framework. |
Team skillset | Agile development emphasizes training all team members to have a wide variety of similar and equal skills. | DevOps divides and spreads the skill set between the development and operation teams. |
Q.2 What is the need for DevOps?
It breaks down communication barriers between development and IT operations teams; the core value of DevOps is to achieve customer satisfaction and deliver its content faster.
The practice of DevOps helps to achieve faster & more secure Delivery of business value to any organization. This value takes the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates. It can involve how quickly a product release or new feature gets into customers’ hands—all with the proper levels of quality and security. Or, it might focus on how quickly an issue or bug is identified and then resolved and re-released.
DevOps also help to achieve the following parameters:
1. Increase deployment frequency
2. The lower failure rate of new releases
3. Shortened lead time between fixes
4. Faster mean time to recovery in the event of new release crashing
Q.3 What is Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment?
Continuous Integration is a coding philosophy that drives development teams to frequently implement small changes and check-in code to version control repositories. Because most modern applications require developing code in different platforms and tools, the team needs a mechanism to integrate and validate its changes.
Continuous Delivery picks up where continuous Integration ends. CD automates the Delivery of applications to selected infrastructure environments. Most teams work with multiple environments other than the production, such as development and testing environments, and CD ensures an automated way to push code changes.
You can also check our in-depth blog on CI/CD for more information.
Watch, Deploying a website using CI/CD Pipeline with Azure DevOps from here.
Q.4 What does CAMS stand for in DevOps?
Culture
DevOps methodology aims to bring unity among different teams to work as a single entity to achieve a designated target for the organization. Since the teams are working together, it creates a positive attitude or culture among the teams, which improves the overall environment for the teams to work.
Automation
This is the most vital factor of the DevOps culture. Automation aims to build a system that eliminates human errors and can fix errors and repeat the successful process without any intervention or delays. Automation dramatically improves the workflow and productivity of the organization.
Measurement
Measurement is all about monitoring and tracking the progress of various activities involved in the DevOps environment. Like Automation, measurement is also essential. By measuring the different system metrics, we can know how the system works or what needs to be done to increase performance, productivity, etc., for the software development lifecycle.
Sharing
The critical success of DevOps in any organization is sharing the tools, discoveries, and knowledge among teams. Sharing has many benefits inside and outside the organization, i.e. finding people who have similar requirements will create newer opportunities to collaborate. Also, Company can eliminate redundant works.
Q.5 What are the different phases in DevOps?
- Plan: In this stage, all the requirements of the project and everything regarding the project, like time for each stage, cost, etc., are discussed. This will help everyone in the team to get a brief idea about the project.
- Code: The code is written over here according to the client’s requirements. Here codes are written in the form of small codes called units.
- Build: Building of the units is done in this step.
- Test: Testing is done in this stage, and if there are mistakes found, it is returned for re-build.
- Integrate: All the units of the codes are integrated into this step.
- Deploy: codeDevOpsNow is deployed in this step on the client’s environment.
- Operate: Operations are performed on the code if required.
- Monitor: Monitoring of the application is done over here in the client’s environment.
Q.6 Explain with a use case where DevOps can be used in industry/ real-life.
Network cycling: Deployment, Testing and rapid designing became ten times faster. It became effortless for the telco service provider to add security patches every day, which used to be done only every three months. Through deployment and design, the new version of network cycling was being rolled out.
Etsy is a peer-to-peer e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items and supplies, as well as unique factory-manufactured items. Etsy struggled with slow, painful site updates that frequently caused the site to go down. It affected sales for millions of Etsy’s users who sold goods through an online marketplace and risked driving them to the competitor.
With the help of a new technical management team, Etsy transitioned from its waterfall model, which produced four-hour full-site deployments twice weekly, to a more agile approach. Today, it has a fully automated deployment pipeline and its continuous delivery
Q.7 What is the use of SSH?
SSH stands for Secure Shell and is an administrative protocol that lets users have access and control the remote servers over the Internet to work using the command line.
It is a secured encrypted version of the previously known Telnet, which was unencrypted and not secure. This ensured that the communication with the remote server occurred in an encrypted form.
Also has a mechanism for remote user authentication, input communication between the client and the host, and sending the output back to the client.
Learn, How to Generate SSH Key Pair for Oracle Cloud (Windows/Linux) from here.
Q.8 Explain Continuous Testing.
Continuous Testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate as rapidly as possible. It evolves and extends test automation to address the increased complexity and pace of modern application development and Delivery.
Q.9 What is the difference between Ansible, Chef and Puppet?
Ansible |
Puppet |
Chef |
Ansible platform is written on python but It supports YAML command Scripts. | Puppet platform is built with Ruby and it only supports Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and Embedded Ruby (ERB). | Chef supports Ruby DSL with crucial prototype programming. |
Its running system is based on a single active node. | Its running system is based on master-slave architecture | It is also configured as a master-slave configuration. |
It uses ssh running system to configure nodes that you want to. | Because of its master-slave configuration, only Puppet clients can configure client machine and puppet server for Master machine | Chef also functions the same as puppet. |
For client system configuration Ansible do not need any proper machine VM and also it is faster to set up. | Puppet needs a certificate signing for client machine configuration because of its master-slave configuration. It is a hectic process also. | For configuring clients machine chef tool has an extra component called a workstation. Workstation is a container of all configuration and after being checked by workstation configuration pass to the master chef-server. |
It uses YAML language which is close to English that’s why it is easy to master and manage the configuration. | Puppet is configured with Puppet DSL only used for the puppet. For that, it is dependent on the system admin. So you have to be a programmer to manage the configuration. | Ruby DSL is the configuration language for Chef. It is also quite tough and to master, you have to be a programmer |
It uses both the pull and push processes to distribute configuration to the nodes. By this process, it makes capable of all servers for question each other and making faster communication. | It only supports the push process. That’s why its communication system is much slower than Ansible. | There is no push process in Chef. It only supports the pull process and also some difficult steps and make the communication process very slow. |
It basically focuses on computer automation systems over configuration management. | It basically focuses progress of Puppet DSL over the pure Ruby version. | It basically focuses on DevOps workflow Automation. |
It is a highly secured tool with SSH. | It is not so highly secured tool like Ansible | It is also not as highly secure as Ansible because Its documentation is spread out and very difficult to get it in order when needed. |
Its price is much lower than Puppet and Chef. You have to spend $10000/year for up to 100 nodes. | Its price is the highest among these three tools. You have to spend $ 11200-$19900 / year for up to 100 nodes. | Its price is cheaper than Puppet but higher than Ansible. $13700/year up to 100 nodes in the price. |
To learn more check out our blog: Why only Terraform? Not Chef, Ansible, Puppet, CloudFormation?
Q.10 What are the three crucial DevOps key performance indicators [KPIs]?
Few KPIs of DevOps are given below:
- Reduce the average time taken to recover from a failure.
- Increase Deployment frequency in which the deployment occurs.
- Reduced Percentage of failed deployments.
Q.11 Explain the term “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) as it relates to configuration management.
- Writing code to manage configuration, deployment, and automatic provisioning.
- Managing data centres with machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration.
- Ensuring all your servers and other infrastructure components are provisioned consistently and effortlessly.
- Administering cloud computing environments, also known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
To know/read more about Infrastructure as Code.
Q.12 Define Azure Boards?
It is a DevOps service that is used to manage the projects of software, It offers various sets of abilities like dashboards, reporting, scrum, and kanban. Its essential feature contains queries, backlogs, sprints, dashboards, and work items.
Azure DevOps Interview Questions For Intermediate
Q.13 Differentiate between Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery?
Continuous integration involves a series of steps that are automatically performed to integrate code from multiple sources, create a build and test. Each time a build or a set of code passes the tests, it’s automatically deployed out to a staging environment where further testing such as load testing and manual exploratory testing is conducted. This process can be repeated for days depending upon the project delivery requirements.
Continuous delivery helps you build a refined version of the software by continuously implementing fixes and feedback until finally, you decide to push it out to production. In other words, continuous delivery involves human decision-making around what to release to the customers, and when. This forms the basis of the difference between the two.
Q.14 What is Version control?
It is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later. Version control systems consist of a central shared repository where teammates can commit changes to a file or set of files.
Version control allows you to:
- Revert files to a previous state.
- Revert the entire project to a previous state.
- Compare changes over time.
- See who last modified something that might be causing a problem.
- Who introduced an issue and when.
Q.15 What are the benefits of using version control?
1. With Version Control System (VCS), all the team members can work freely on any file at any time.
2. VCS will later allow you to merge all the changes into a standard version.
3. All the past versions and variants are neatly packed up inside the VCS. When you need it, you can request any version at any time, and you’ll have a snapshot of the complete project right at hand.
4. Every time you save a new version of your project, your VCS requires you to describe what was changed briefly. Additionally, you can see what exactly was changed in the file’s content. This allows you to know who has made what change in the project.
5. A distributed VCS like Git allows all the team members to have the complete history of the project, so if there is a breakdown in the central server, you can use any of your teammate’s local Git repositories.
Q.16 Make a comparison between Azure DevOps server and services?
Azure DevOps services: It is a Microsoft service of cloud, which is reliable, scalable and hosted services that are available globally.
Azure DevOps server: It is a kind of on-premise, which is used to build the back end server of SQL. People select this option for the requirement of their day with the network, the main reason for selecting it contains the requirement of SQL servers access by using azure data and tools.
They both provide the same services along with particular advantages, the given below are some benefits of services
- It easily manages the server.
- Its remote sites are used for the best connectivity.
- The latest features get quick access.
Q.17 What are containers in DevOps, and which container platforms does DevOps support?
This is quite a general question asked within a DevOps interview, so it’s certainly worth getting to grips with. The role of containers is to provide a single place to store software code, configurations, and dependencies. If you’re looking to build on your answer further, you could mention how it’s possible for multiple containers to run simultaneously on a single machine. Because of the important role they play, containers can help in more efficient and reliable deployments.
Azure DevOps provides container support via a few platforms including Docker and Asp.Net, as well as Kubernetes Services and more. So, be sure to mention at least a few of these to complete the question.
Q.18 What are Microsoft-hosted agents in the Azure pipeline?
When you run your azure pipeline the job gets executed. Every job will run on the agent (i.e. the compute infrastructure). Microsoft itself provide the agents which is the virtual machine installed with agent software. If you opt for choosing the agent as Microsoft-hosted agents then everything will be taken care of by Microsoft from assigning the resource and installing the software and maintaining updates.
Q.19 What is a self-hosted agent in the Azure pipeline?
A self-hosted agent is an agent which you set up and manage on your own to run jobs. You choose to opt for self-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines when you want more control to install dependent software needed for your builds and deployments. Also, machine-level caches and configurations persist from run to run, which can boost speed.
Q.20 Explain the Blue-Green Deployment Technique.
Blue-green deployment is a technique that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments called Blue and Green. At any time, only one of the environments is live, with the live environment serving all production traffic. For this example, Blue is currently live and Green is idle.
As you prepare a new version of your software, deployment and the final stage of testing takes place in an environment that is not live: in this example, Green. Once you have deployed and fully tested the software in Green, you switch the router so all incoming requests now go to Green instead of Blue. Green is now live, and Blue is idle.
This technique can eliminate downtime due to application deployment. In addition, blue-green deployment reduces risk: if something unexpected happens with your new version on Green, you can immediately roll back to the last version by switching back to Blue.
To learn more, read our blog, Blue-Green Deployment in Azure
Q.21 Which open source or community tools do you use to make Puppet more powerful?
- Changes in the configuration are tracked using Jira, and further maintenance is done through internal procedures.
- Version control takes the support of Git and Puppet’s code manager app.
- The changes are also passed through Jenkin’s continuous integration pipeline.
Q.22 What is the difference between Azure DevOps and VSTS Online?
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services, now known as Azure DevOps having an excellent application lifecycle management tool.
We can plan a project with Agile tools and templates, manage and run test plans, Version control source code and manage the branches, deploy the solution across all platforms using Azure Pipelines, by implementing Continuous Instigation and Continuous Deployment.
Q.23 How can you set up the notification for work items, code, review, Pull requests and build in Azure DevOps, so that team members can take the corresponding action accordingly?
Email notification can be set for work items, PR and other azure DevOps related activities. For setting up the email notification we need to follow below-mentioned steps:
- Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{yourorganization}).
- Go to Project settings > Notifications.
- Select New subscription.
- Select the type of activity you want your team to be notified of.
- Provide a description to help you identify the subscription later.
- Choose which team members should receive a notification:
- Choose whether you want to receive notifications about activity in all projects or only a specific project.
- Optionally, configure additional filter criteria.
- Select Finish to save the new subscription.
Q.24 What are Azure Test Plans?
Azure Test Plans are a service with Azure DevOps that provides a browser-based test management solution. It also provides crucial capabilities in exploratory testing, user acceptance testing, and planned manual testing. They also have a browser extension to provide exploratory testing alongside a collection of feedback from stakeholders.
Manual and exploratory testing are important techniques for the evaluation of a product or service quality. In addition, Azure Test Plans are also responsible for realizing the focus of DevOps on automated testing. Also, helps in assimilating the contributions from developers, testers, product owners, user experience advocates, and managers to the quality of a project.
Azure DevOps Interview Questions for Experienced
Q.25 Can you explain a case study of where DevOps has been used in the industry?
With the tech landscape constantly evolving, it’s important that an employer knows you’re keeping up to date with industry news and utilizing it in your own learning and development. This type of question aims to delve deeper than your own experience working with DevOps, and instead, looks at what you might have learnt from how others operate.
There are so many great companies you could talk about for this question, including the likes of Amazon who introduced DevOps to overcome monolithic architecture, moving from physical services to cloud-based AWS. Similarly, you could discuss how Etsy beat two-week-long deployment rates by bringing in a team to adopt DevOps practices which meant they could begin deploying services 50-100 times a day.
Whatever example you use, make sure you have a great understanding of the processes the company initially used and the associated problems that arose from these, and finally how they used DevOps to solve this. If they introduced DevOps a while ago, the way they use it may now differ from what they used it for at the beginning, so getting up-to-date information will boost your answer to the next level.
Q.26 How you can view the details of agents using the Azure CLI command?
az pipelines agent show –agent-id
–pool-id
[–detect {false, true}]
[–include-assigned-request {false, true}]
[–include-capabilities {false, true}]
[–include-last-completed-request {false, true}]
[–org]
[–subscription]
Q.27 Assume that you are an Azure DevOps engineer and working for XYZ organization. Your project manager is forcing you to use Microsoft-hosted agents for azure pipelines. However, you think the team should choose a self-hosted agent. What could be the reason for your choice?
Microsoft hosted agent is easy to set up but it has some limitations as well which are as follows:
Build duration: Assigning the build agent for the job can take up some time which can increase the build duration.
Disk space: In the hosted agents the amount of storage provided is fixed and sometimes it won’t be good enough for large builds.
Interactivity: We can’t sign in to a hosted agent.
File shares: We can’t drop build artifacts to Universal Naming Convention (UNC) file shares.
Q.28 How will you secure Jenkins?
There are multiple ways too, so I have mentioned the ways in which I will do it, but If you have any other way of doing it, you can mention it in the comments section below:
- Ensure global security is on.
- Ensure that Jenkins is integrated with my Company’s user directory with the appropriate plugin.
- Ensure that matrix/Project matrix is enabled to fine-tune access.
- Automate the process of setting rights/privileges in Jenkins with a custom version controlled script.
- Limit physical access to Jenkins data/folders.
- Periodically run security audits on same.
Read More, Jenkins Overview and Installation Pre-requisites
Q.29 What should you do to make a NuGet package available to anonymous users outside your organization alongside minimizing the number of publication points?
The answer is the introduction of a new feed for the package. Packages that are hosted in Azure Artifacts, find storage in a feed. Sharing packages with higher scalability and according to requirements can be ensured by setting up permissions on the feed. These multiple feeds enable control of access to packages across four levels. These four levels of access are:
- Owners
- Readers
- Contributors
- Collaborators
Q.30 What are the necessary components for the integration of Azure DevOps and Bitbucket?
The integration of Azure DevOps and Bitbuckets requires a self-hosted agent and an external Git service connection. Since GitLab CI/CD is compatible with GitHub and Bitbucket. Instead of moving an entire project to GitLab, it is possible to connect the external repository. One can make use of GitLab CI/CD in this manner.
Conclusion
We have covered some frequently asked Azure DevOps Interview Questions and Answers to help you for your Interview. All these Essential Azure DevOps Interview Questions are targeted at mid-level experienced professionals and freshers.
Download The Complete Azure DevOps Interview Questions & Answers
When you have tested your knowledge by answering these AZ-400 Interview questions & answers, I hope you have a clear stand in terms of your Azure DevOps [AZ-400] Interview preparation.
Note: K21Academy also offers an Azure DevOps [AZ-400] Questions & Answers Prep Guide where learners get to practice questions to test AZ-400 interview preparation before the actual interview round.
To download the guide click here.
Related/References
- Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer (AZ-400) Q/A: Day1 Live Session Review
- Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer (AZ-400) Q/A: Day2 Live Session Review
- [AZ-400] Roles And Responsibilities As An Azure DevOps Engineer
- [AZ-400] Azure DevOps Services for Beginners
- [AZ-400] Azure DevOps For Beginners
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Gandikota Saihari says
I am instrested in devops
Rahul Dangayach says
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Team K21 Academy
sravani says
excellent questions for interview point of you
Rahul Dangayach says
Hi Sravani,
We are glad you liked our blog.
Stay tuned for more informative blog like these.
Thanks and Regards
Rahul Dangayach
Team K21Academy